What is WordPress, you ask?
It’s a great question. You, as the potential or current website owner may want to know about some of the latest innovations in website design before you chat to the experts. At least that way you can make educated and informed decisions based on what the experts say, and your own knowledge empowered by research.
Let’s begin by giving the Wikipedia definition: “WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and a content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL. Features include a plugin architecture and a template system. WordPress was used by more than 22.0% of the top 10 million websites as of August 2013. WordPress is the most popular blogging system in use on the Web, at more than 60 million websites.”
Now you understand perfectly, don’t you? Okay, okay, let’s break it down from mumbo jumbo to language anyone can comprehend. From this Wikipedia definition one thing is very clear – it is popular. Just because something is popular, does it mean that you should use it, too? No, not necessarily, but it certainly warrants knowing about, then you can decide for yourself. Hopefully by the end of this blog you will have a clearer picture of what WordPress is.
What does a blog have in common with other websites? Give up? Words and pictures. Life would be boring without them. We need them, we want them, and the internet supplies them in abundance. How on earth did so many words and pictures get there? Well, according to the above definition, with the help of the template system called WordPress. Yes WordPress is a guide, a theme, showing you where to your place your information.
When you were a child were you ever given one of those books with stickers? They had two pages of stickers that you peeled off and put in the right places in the book. Fun, weren’t they? WordPress in these terms, is a giant sticker book. Except you aren’t given the stickers; you make your own unique ones. You provide the words (content) and pictures (artwork) to stick in (insert). WordPress shows you where to insert your information, because it provides the boxes or the framework to put the content in.
That’s where TBA Media come in. Even though providing content and artwork sounds easy, try this: sit down and write about ten A4 pages to promote your business or the reason for your website. And then produce artwork on your computer to use. Even if you succeeded in these tasks, it is likely you would have spent a monster amount of time doing it. Time that should be spent doing things you view more important. The TBA Media team take all the stress and anxiety of having to do this yourself, and you will be very impressed with the result. We can write the content, create the artwork and make customised layouts and designs that will make your website stand out from rest.
Now back to WordPress, an excellent feature of this system is that, if you, as the owner desire, you can be shown how to login and edit your own information, and with additional training you can perform more complicated tasks like adding pages and changing the format of an existing page. Or not: TBA Media can also do all those things for you if you would rather concentrate on other things in life.
Of course, there are a whole bunch of other terms and acronyms that only live in the cyber-world, that could be explained in this blog, like, plugins, SEO – Search Engine Optimisation, which is right now on the tips of many tongues since it’s the only way your website will come to the top of the list when you search in Google. But those explanations are for another day. Unless you as the reader have another term you would rather explained first. Just leave a ‘comment’ and let me know.
And to re-cap, what is WordPress? Yes, that’s right – a giant sticker book that you put your own unique stickers (content and artwork) in, and then, if and when you want, you can edit from the comfort of your own chair. Interesting isn’t it?